Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Hacking and grifting

If this is true, it's a big problem for the Clintons, and for all of us really:

The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation was among the organizations breached by suspected Russian hackers in a dragnet of the U.S. political apparatus ahead of the November election, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The attacks on the foundation’s network, as well as those of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, compound concerns about her digital security even as the FBI continues to investigate her use of a personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state.

Clinton Foundation officials said the organization hadn’t been notified of the breach and declined to comment further. The compromise of the foundation’s computers was first identified by government investigators as recently as last week, the people familiar with the matter said. Agents monitor servers used by hackers to communicate with their targets, giving them a back channel view of attacks, often even before the victims detect them.

The whole point of Hillary Clinton's efforts to maintain a homebrew server for her communications was to keep the prying eyes of inspectors general and others seeking to scrutinize her dealings. It's worth remembering that, around the time of the public disclosure of the homebrew server, Mrs. Clinton directed that up to 30,000 "personal" emails be removed from the server. The claims we heard at the time included the preposterous idea that the removed emails were about Mrs. Clinton's yoga schedule, or wedding planning for her daughter, and the like. It's far more likely that much of the email traffic that was deleted involved dealings between Mrs. Clinton and her family's foundation, which received many millions of dollars from nations who had business with Mrs. Clinton and the federal government. A handy chart:

Follow the money, as always

None of these numbers are in dispute. What we don't know is Hillary Clinton's personal involvement in these transactions, and if there is any impropriety involved. She knows the answer and, if the Foundation has been breached, you can safely assume the Russian government, among others, knows the answer. If she has something to hide, the Russians will have a huge amount of, ahem, leverage in dealing with Mrs. Clinton, should she manage to get into the Oval Office.

At bottom, the overarching issue with the Clintons has always been their penchant for grifting. We need honest leadership in Washington and returning the Clintons to power is hardly the way to bring that about.

Regarding whether she's involved, does it matter? If she did, she belongs in jail, and if she didn't, she would have been an incompetent administrator of her own foundation and also an incompetent Secretary of State. Combine that with how people have her data, and electing her would be a nasty risk.

So if Russia, China, Iran and Poland (and say Hungary, too) have leverage on Madame Acherontia, and their respective desires are mutually exclusive so that something is going to be revealed, what then?

Come to think of it, I'm kinda surprised no hacker in the U.S. has come out with what was there yet. The way DC gossips, you'd have to be almost certain someone who hates her guts had heard of that server and told his cousin in Silicon Valley....